Washington and the Riddle of Peace E-Book

Herbert George Wells

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 242

Beschreibung

This fate is not threatening civilization; it is happening to civilization before our eyes. The ship of civilization is not going to sink in five years' time or in fifty years' time. It is sinking now. -from "The Immensity of the Issue and the Triviality of Man" In the wake of World War I, the victor nations came together to shape the postwar era... and in doing so, laid the ground for the next great war. That was already obvious in 1921, when H. G. Wells gathered in one volume his essays for the New York World, the Chicago Tribune, and other American and European newspapers written in reaction to what he saw and heard at the Washington Conference to organize the peace. Though known, along with Jules Verne, as one of the 19th-century fathers of science fiction, here Wells explores more down-to-earth issues, from the "problem" of Russia and Japan-and how little could hope to be accomplished at this conference without their participation-to the "economic decadence" of the world and how to arrest it. Wells' intriguing foresight shines through, making this a fascinating document of the international disaster of the World Wars. British author HERBERT GEORGE WELLS (1866-1946) is best known for his groundbreaking science fiction novels The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). ALSO FROM COSIMO: Wells's God the Invisible King, A Short History of the World, and The Soul of a Bishop

Leseprobe

Washington and the Riddle of Peace

Pages de titreINTRODUCTIONI THE IMMENSITY OF THE ISSUE AND THE TRIVIALITY OF MENII ARMAMENTS THE FUTILITY OF MERE LIMITATIONIII THE TRAIL OF VERSAILLESIV THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WARV THE PRESIDENT AT ARLINGTONVI THE FIRST MEETINGVII WHAT IS JAPAN?VIII CHINA IN THE BACKGROUNDIX THE FUTURE OF JAPANX “SECURITY”—THE NEW AND BEAUTIFUL CATCHWORDXI FRANCE IN THE LIMELIGHTXII THUS FARXIII THE LARGER QUESTION BEHIND THE CONFERENCEXIV THE REAL THREAT TO CIVILIZATIONXV THE POSSIBLE BREAKDOWN OF CIVILIZATIONXVI WHAT OF AMERICA?XVII EBB TIDE AT WASHINGTONXVIII AMERICA AND ENTANGLING ALLIANCESXIX AN ASSOCIATION OF NATIONSXX FRANCE AND ENGLAND—THE PLAIN FACTS OF THE CASEXXI A REMINDER ABOUT WARXXII SOME STIFLED VOICESXXIII INDIA, THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONSXXIV THE OTHER END OF PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE—THE SIEVE FOR GOOD INTENTIONSXXV AFRICA AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONSXXVI THE FOURTH PLENARY SESSIONXXVII ABOUT THE WAR DEBTSXXVIII THE FOUNDATION STONE AND THE BUILDINGXXIX WHAT A STABLY ORGANIZED WORLD PEACE MEANS FOR MANKINDCopyright

Washington and the Riddle of Peace

BY

H. G. WELLS

INTRODUCTION

These twenty-nine papers do not profess to be a record or description of the Washington Conference. They give merely the impressions and fluctuating ideas of one visitor to that conference. They show the reaction of that gathering upon a mind keenly set upon the idea of an organized world peace; they record phases of enthusiasm, hope, doubt, depression and irritation. They have scarcely been touched, except to correct a word or a phrase here or there; they are dated; in all essentials they are the articles just as they appeared in the New York World, the Chicago Tribune, and the other American and European papers which first gave them publicity. It is due to the enterprise and driving energy of the New York World, be it noted, that they were ever written at all. But in spite of the daily change and renewal of mood and attitude, inevitable under the circumstances, they do tell a consecutive story; they tell of the growth and elaboration of a conviction of how things can be done, and of how they need to be done, if our civilization is indeed to be rescued from the dangers that encompass it and set again upon the path of progress. They record—and in a very friendly and appreciative spirit—the birth and unfolding of the “Association of Nations” idea, the Harding idea, of world pacification, they note some of the peculiar circumstances of that birth, and they study the chief difficulties on its way to realization. It is, the writer believes, the most practical and hopeful method of attacking this riddle of the Sphinx that has hitherto been proposed.

H. G. Wells.

I THE IMMENSITY OF THE ISSUE AND THE TRIVIALITY OF MEN

Washington, Nov. 7.

The conference nominally for the limitation of armaments that now gathers at Washington may become a cardinal event in the history of mankind. It may mark a turning point in human affairs or it may go on record as one of the last failures to stave off the disasters and destruction that gather about our race.

In August, 1914, an age of insecure progress and accumulation came to an end. When at last, on the most momentous summer night in history, the long preparations of militarism burst their bounds and the little Belgian village Vise went up in flames, men said: “This is a catastrophe.” But they found it hard to anticipate the nature of the catastrophe. They thought for the most part of the wounds and killing and burning of war and imagined that when at last the war was over we should count our losses and go on again much as we did before 1914.

As well might a little shopkeeper murder his wife in the night and expect to carry on “business as usual” in the morning. “Business as usual”—that was the catchword in Britain in 1914; of all the catchwords of the world it carries now the heaviest charge of irony.

The catastrophe of 1914 is still going on. It does not end; it increases and spreads. This winter more people will suffer dreadful things and more people will die untimely through the clash of 1914 than suffered and died in the first year of the war. It is true that the social collapse of Russia in 1917 and the exhaustion of food and munitions in Central Europe in 1918 produced a sort of degradation and enfeeblement of the combatant efforts of our race and that a futile conference at Versailles settled nothing, with an air of settling everything, but that was no more an end to disaster than it would be if a man who was standing up and receiving horrible wounds were to fall down and writhe and bleed in the dust. It would be merely a new phase of disaster. Since 1919 this world has not so much healed its wounds as realized its injuries.

Chief among these injuries is the progressive economic breakdown, the magnitude of which we are only beginning to apprehend. The breakdown is a real decay that spreads and spreads. In a time of universal shortage there is an increasing paralysis in production; and there is a paralysis of production because the monetary system of the world, which was sustained by the honest co-operation of Governments, is breaking down. The fluctuations in the real value of money become greater and greater and they shake and shatter the entire fabric of social co-operation.

Our civilization is, materially, a cash and credit system, dependent on men’s confidence in the value of money. But now money fails us and cheats us; we work for wages and they give us uncertain paper. No one now dare make contracts ahead; no one can fix up a stable wages agreement; no one knows what one hundred dollars or francs or pounds will mean in two years’ time.

What is the good of saving? What is the good of foresight? Business and employment become impossible. Unless money can be steadied and restored, our economic and social life will go on disintegrating, and it can be restored only by a world effort.

But such a world effort to restore business and prosperity is only possible between governments sincerely at peace, and because of the failure of Versailles there is no such sincere peace. Everywhere the Governments, and notably Japan and France, arm. Amidst the steady disintegration of the present system of things, they prepare for fresh wars, wars that can have only one end—an extension of the famine and social collapse that have already engulfed Russia to the rest of the world.

In Russia, in Austria, in many parts of Germany, this social decay is visible in actual ruins, in broken down railways and suchlike machinery falling out of use. But even in Western Europe, in France and England, there is a shabbiness, there is a decline visible to any one with a keen memory.

The other day my friend Mr. Charlie Chaplin brought his keen observant eyes back to London, after an absence of ten years.

“People are not laughing and careless here as they used to be,” he told me. “It isn’t the London I remember. They are anxious. Something hangs over them.”

Coming as I do from Europe to America, I am amazed at the apparent buoyancy and abundance of New York. The place seems to possess an inexhaustible vitality. But this towering, thundering, congested city, with such a torrent of traffic and such a concourse of people as I have never seen before, is, after all, the European door of America; it draws this superabundant and astounding life from trade, from a trade whose roots are dying.

When one looks at New York its assurance is amazing; when one reflects we realize its tremendous peril. It is going on—as London is going on—by accumulated inertia. With the possible exception of London, the position of New York seems to me the most perilous of that of any city in the world. What is to happen to this immense crowd of people if the trade that feeds it ebbs? As assuredly it will ebb unless the decline of European money and business can be arrested, unless, that is, the world problem of trade and credit can be grappled with as a world affair.

The world’s economic life, its civilization, embodied in its great towns, is disintegrating and collapsing through the strains of the modern war threat and of the disunited control of modern affairs.

This in general terms is the situation of mankind today; this is the situation, the tremendous and crucial situation, that President Harding, the head and spokesman of what is now the most powerful and influential state in the world, has called representatives from most of the states in the world to Washington to discuss.

Whatever little modifications and limitations the small cunning of diplomatists may impose upon the terms of reference of the conference, the plain common sense of mankind will insist that its essential inquiry is, “What are we to do, if anything can possibly be done, to arrest and reverse the slide toward continuing war preparation and war and final social collapse?” And you would imagine that this momentous conference would gather in a mood of exalted responsibility, with every conceivable help and every conceivable preparation to grasp the enormous issues involved.

Let us dismiss any such delusion from our minds.

Let us face a reality too often ignored in the dignified discussion of such business as this Washington Conference, and that is this: that the human mind takes hold of such very big questions as the common peace of the earth and the general security of mankind with very great reluctance and that it leaves go with extreme alacrity.

We are all naturally trivial creatures. We do not live from year to year; we live from day to day. Our minds naturally take short views and are distracted by little, immediate issues. We forget with astonishing facility. And this is as true of the high political persons who will gather at Washington as it is of any overworked clerk who will read about the conference in a street car or on the way home to supper and bed. These big questions affect everybody, and also they are too big for anybody. A great intellectual and moral effect is required if they are to be dealt with in any effectual manner.

I find the best illustration of this incurable drift toward triviality in myself. In the world of science the microscope helps the telescope and the infinitely little illuminates the infinitely great.

Let me put myself under the lens: Exhibit 1—If any one has reason to focus the whole of his mental being upon this Washington Conference it is I. It is my job to attend to it and to think of it and of nothing else. Whatever I write about it, wise or foolish, will be conspicuously published in a great number of newspapers and will do much to make or mar my reputation. Intellectually, I am convinced of the supreme possibilities of the occasion. It may make or mar mankind. The smallest and the greatest of motives march together; therefore my self-love and my care for mankind. And the occasion touches all my future happiness.

If this downward drift toward disorder and war is not arrested, in a few years’ time it will certainly catch my sons and probably mutilate or kill them; and my wife and I, instead of spending our declining years in comfort, will be involved in the general wretchedness and possibly perish in some quite miserable fashion, as thousands of just our sort of family have already perished in Austria and Russia. This is indeed the outlook for most of us if these efforts to secure permanent peace which are now being concentrated at Washington fail.

Here surely are reasons enough, from the most generous to the most selfish, for putting my whole being, with the utmost concentration, into this business. You might imagine I think nothing but conference, do nothing but work upon the conference.

Well, I find I don’t.

Before such evils as now advance upon humanity, man’s imagination seems scarcely more adequate than that of the park deer I have seen feeding contentedly beside the body of a shot companion.

I am, when I recall my behavior in the last few weeks, astonished at my own levity. I have been immensely interested by the voyage across the Atlantic; I have been tremendously amused by the dissertations of a number of fellow-travellers upon the little affair of Prohibition; I have been looking up old friends and comparing the New York City of today with the New York City of fifteen years ago. I spent an afternoon loitering along Fifth Avenue, childishly pleased by the shops and the crowd, I find myself tempted to evade luncheon where I shall hear a serious discussion of the Pacific question, because I want to explore the mysteries of a chop suey without outside assistance.

Yet no one knows better than I do that this very attractive, glitteringly attractive, thundering, towering city is in the utmost danger. Within a very few years the same chill wind of economic disaster that has wrecked Petersburg and brought death to Vienna and Warsaw may be rusting and tarnishing all this glistening, bristling vitality. In a little while, within my lifetime, New York City may stand even more gaunt, ruinous, empty and haunted than that stricken and terrible ruin, Petersburg.

My mind was inadequate against the confident reality of a warm October afternoon, against bright clothes and endless automobiles, against the universal suggestion that everything would shine on forever. And my mind is something worse than thus inadequate; I find it is deliberately evasive. It tries to run away from the task I have set it. I find my mind, at the slightest pretext, slipping off from this difficult tangle of problems through which the Washington Conference has to make its way.

For instance, I have got it into my head that I shall owe it to myself to take a holiday after the conference, and two beautiful words have taken possession of my mind—Florida and the Everglades. A vision of exploration amidst these wonderful sun-soaked swamps haunts me. I consult a guide book for information about Washington and the procedure of Congress, and I discover myself reading about Miami or Indian River.

So it is we are made. A good half of those who read this and who have been pulling themselves together to think about the hard tasks and heavy dangers of international affairs will brighten up at this mention of a holiday in the Everglades—either because they have been there or because they would like to go. They will want to offer experiences and suggestions and recommend hotels and guides.

And apart from this triviality of the attention, this pathetic disposition to get as directly as possible to the nearest agreeable thoughts which I am certain every statesman and politician at the conference shares in some measure with the reader and myself, we are also encumbered, every one of us, with prejudices and prepossessions.

There is patriotism—the passion that makes us see human affairs as a competitive game instead of a common interest; a game in which “our side,” by fair means or foul, has to get the better—inordinately—of the rest of mankind. For my own part, though I care very little for the British Empire, which I think a temporary, patched-up thing, I have a passionate pride in being of the breed that produced such men as Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Cromwell, Newton, Washington, Darwin, Nelson and Lincoln. And I love the peculiar humor and kindly temper of an English crowd and the soft beauty of an English countryside with a strong, possessive passion.

I find it hard to think that other peoples matter quite as much as the English. I want to serve the English and to justify the English. Intellectually I know better, but no man’s intelligence is continually dominant; fatigue him or surprise him, and habits and emotions take control. And not only that I have this bias which will always tend to make me run crooked in favor of my own people, but also I come to Washington with deep, irrational hostilities.

For example: Political events have exasperated me with the present Polish Government. It is an unhappy thing that Poland should rise from being the unwilling slave of German and Russian reaction to become the willing tool of French reaction. But that is no reason why one should drift into a dislike of Poland and all things Polish, and because Poland is so ill-advised as to grab more than she is entitled to, that one should be disposed to give her less than she is entitled to. Yet I do find a drift in that direction.

And prejudice soon breaks away into downright quarrelsomeness. It is amusing or distressing, as you will, to find how easily I, as a professional peacemaker, can be tempted into a belligerent attitude. “Of course,” I say, ruffled by some argument, “if Japan chooses to be unreasonable”—

I make no apologies for this autobiographical tone. It is easier and less contentious to dissect one’s self than to set to work on any one else for anatomical ends. This is Exhibit No. 1. We are all like this. There are no demigods or supermen in our world superior to such trivialities, limitations, prejudices and patriotisms. We have all got them, as we have all got livers.

Every soul that gathers in Washington will have something of that disposition to get away to the immediately pleasant, will be disposed to take a personal advantage, will have a bias for race and country, will have imperfectly suppressed racial and national animosities, will be mentally hurried and crowded. That mental hurrying and crowding has to be insisted upon.

This will be a great time for Washington, no doubt, to have a very gay and exciting time. It becomes the focus of the world’s affairs. All sorts of interesting people are heading for Washington, bright-eyed and expectant. There will be lunches, dinners, receptions and such like social occasions in great abundance, dramatic, and encounters, flirtations, scandals, jealousies and quarrels. Quiet thought, reconsideration—will Washington afford any hole or cover for such things? A most distracting time it will be and it will be extraordinarily difficult to keep its real significance in mind.

So let us repeat here its real significance.

The great war has struck a blow at the very foundations of our civilization; it has shattered the monetary system which is the medium of all our economic life. A rotting down of civilization is spreading now very rapidly and nothing is being done to arrest it. Production stagnates and dwindles. This can only be restored by the frank collective action of the chief powers of the world.

At present the chief powers of the world show no signs of the collective action demanded. They are still obsessed by old-fashioned ideas of national sovereignty and national competition, and though all verge on bankruptcy, they maintain and develop fresh armies and fleets. That is to say, they are in the preparatory stage of another war. So long as this divided and threatening state of affairs continues there can be no stability, no real general recovery; shortages will increase, famine will spread; towns, cities, communications will decay; increasing masses of starving unemployed will resort to more and more desperate and violent protests, until they assume a quasi-revolutionary character. Education will ebb, and social security dwindle and fade into anarchy. Civilization as we know it will go under and a new Dark Age begin.

And this fate is not threatening civilization; it is happening to civilization before our eyes. The ship of civilization is not going to sink in five years’ time or in fifty years’ time. It is sinking now. Russia is under the water line; she has ceased to produce, she starves; large areas of Eastern Europe and Asia sink toward the same level; the industrial areas of Germany face a parallel grim decline; the winter will be the worst on record for British labor. The pulse of American business weakens.

To face which situation in the world’s affairs, this crowd of hastily compiled representatives, and their associates, dependents and satellites, now gathers at Washington. They are all, from President Harding down to the rawest stenographer girl, human beings. That is to say, they are all inattentive, moody, trivial, selfish, evasive, patriotic, prejudiced creatures, unable to be intelligently selfish even, for more than a year or so ahead, after the nature of our Exhibit No. 1.

Every one has some sort of blinding personal interest to distort the realities that he has to face. Politicians have to think of their personal prestige and their party associations; naval and military experts have to think of their careers.

One may argue it is as good a gathering as our present circumstances permit. Probably there is some good will for all mankind in every one who comes. Probably not one is altogether blind to the tremendous disaster that towers over us, but all are forgetful.

And yet this Washington Conference may prove to be the nearest approach the human will and intelligence has yet made to a resolute grapple against fate upon this planet. We cannot make ourselves wiser than we are, but in this phase of universal danger we can at least school ourselves to the resolve to be charitable and frank with one another to the best of our ability, to be forgiving debtors, willing to retreat from hasty and impossible assumptions, seeking patience in hearing and generosity in action. High aims and personal humility may yet save mankind.

II ARMAMENTS THE FUTILITY OF MERE LIMITATION

Washington, Nov. 8.

It would seem that the peculiar circumstances of its meeting demand that the Washington Conference should begin with a foregone futility, the discussion of the limitation of armaments and of the restrictions of warfare in certain directions, while nations are still to remain sovereign and free to make war and while there exists no final and conclusive court of decision for international disputes except warfare.

A number of people do really seem to believe that we can go on with all the various states of the earth still as sovereign and independent of each other as wild beasts in a jungle, with no common rule and no common law, and yet that we can contrive it that they will agree to make war only in a mild and mitigated fashion, after due notice and according to an approved set of regulations. Such ideas are quite seriously entertained and they are futile and dangerous ideas. A committee of the London League of Nations Union, for example, has been debating with the utmost gravity whether the use of poison gas and the sinking of neutral ships to enforce a blockade should be permitted and whether “all modern developments” in warfare should not be abolished. “The feasibility of preventing secret preparations and the advantages of surprise were also considered.” It is as if warfare was a game.

It is a little difficult to reason respectfully against that sort of project. One is moved rather to add helpful suggestions in the same vein. As for example, that no hostilities shall be allowed to begin or continue except in the presence of a League of Nations referee, who shall be marked plainly on the chest and pants with the red cross of Geneva and who—for the convenience of aircraft—shall carry an open sunshade similarly adorned. He shall be furnished with a powerful whistle or hand trumpet audible above the noise of modern artillery, and military operations shall be at once arrested when this whistle is blown. Contravention of the rules laid down by the League of Nations shall be penalized according to the gravity of the offense, with penalties ranging from, let us say, an hour’s free bombardment of the offender’s position to the entire forces of the enemy being addressed very severely by the referee and ordered off the field.

In the event of either combatant winning the war, outright by illegitimate means, it might further be provided that such combatant should submit to a humiliating peace, just as if the war had been lost.

Unhappily war is not a game but the grimmest of realities, and no power on earth exists to prevent a nation which is fighting for existence against another nation from resorting to any expedient however unfair, cruel and barbarous to enforce victory or avert disaster. Success justifies every expedient in warfare, and you cannot prevent that being so. A nation, hoping to win and afterward make friends with its enemy or solicitous for the approval of some powerful neutral, may conceivably refrain from effective but objectionable expedients, but that is a voluntary and strategic restraint. The fact remains that war is an ultimate and illimitable thing; a war that can be controlled is a war that could have been stopped or prevented. If our race can really bar the use of poison gas it can bar the use of any kind of weapon. It is indeed easier to enforce peace altogether than any lesser limitation of war.

But it is argued that this much may be true nevertheless, that if the nations of the world will agree beforehand not to prepare for particular sorts of war or if they will agree to reduce their military and naval equipment to a minimum, that this will operate powerfully in preventing contraventions and in a phase of popular excitement arresting the rush toward war. The only objection to this admirable proposal is that no power which has desires or rights that can only be satisfied or defended, so far as it knows, by war, will ever enter into such a disarmament agreement in good faith.

Of course countries contemplating war and having no serious intention of disarming effectually will enter quite readily into conferences upon disarmament, but they will do so partly because of the excellent propaganda value of such a participation and mainly because of the chance it gives them of some restriction which will hamper a possible antagonist much more than it will hamper themselves. For instance, Japan would probably be very pleased to reduce her military expenditure to quite small figures if the United States reduced theirs to the same amount, because the cost per head of maintaining soldiers under arms is much less in Japan than in America; and she would be still more ready to restrict naval armament to ships with a radius of action of 2,000 miles or less because that would give her a free hand with China and the Philippines. That sort of haggling was going on between Britain and Germany at The Hague at intervals before the great war. Neither party believed in the peaceful intentions of the other nor regarded these negotiations as anything but strategic moves. And as things were in Europe it was difficult to regard them in any other way.

No, the limitation of armaments quite as much as the mitigation of warfare is impossible until war has been made impossible, and then the complete extinction of armaments follows without discussion; and war can only be made impossible when the powers of the world have done what the thirteen original States of American Union found they had to do after their independence was won, and that is set up a common law and rule over themselves. Such a project is a monstrously difficult one no doubt, and it flies in the face of great masses of patriotic cant and of natural prejudices and natural suspicion, but it is a thing that can be done. It is the only thing that can be done to avert the destruction of civilization through war and war preparation. Disarmament and the limitation of warfare without such a merging of sovereignty look, at the first glance, easier and more modest proposals, but they suffer from the fatal defect of absolute impracticability. They are things that cannot be made working realities. A world that could effectually disarm would be a world already at one, and disarmament would be of no importance whatever. Given stable international relations, the world would put aside its armaments as naturally as a man takes off his coat in winter on entering a warm house.

And as a previous article has pointed out, wars, preparations for war and the threat of war are only the more striking aspect of human disunion at the present time. The smashing up of the world’s currency system and the progressive paralysis of industry that follows on that is a much more immediate disaster. That is rushing upon us. This war talk between Japan and America may end as abruptly as the snarling of two dogs overtaken by a flood. There may not be another great war after all, because both in Japan and America social disruption may come first. Upon financial and economic questions the powers of the earth must get together very quickly now or perish; the signs get more imperative every day; and if they get together upon these common issues, then they will have little reason or excuse for not taking up the merely international issues at the same time.

There is a curious exaggeration of respect for patriotism and patriotic excesses in all these projects for disarmament and the mitigation of warfare. We have to “consider patriotic susceptibilities”; that is the stereotyped formula of objection to the plain necessity of overriding the present barbaric sovereignty of separate states by a world rule and a world law protecting the common interests of the common people of the world. In practice these “patriotic susceptibilities”; will often be found to resolve themselves into nothing more formidable than the conceit and self-importance of some foreign office official. In general they are little more than a snarling suspiciousness of foreign people. Most people are patriotically excitable, it is in our human nature, but that no more excuses this excessive deference to patriotism than it would excuse a complete tolerance of boozing and of filthy vices and drunken and lustful outrages because we are all more or less susceptible to thirst and desire. And while there is all this deference for the most ramshackle and impromptu of nationalisms there is a complete disregard of the influence and of the respect due to one of the greatest and most concentrated interests of our modern world, the finance, the science, the experts, the labor, often very specialized and highly skilled, of the armament and munitions and associated trades and industries.